Doing the Unexpected

Open a copy of Entrepreneur magazine and you’ll see ads for business opportunities. Flip through the pages of Vogue and you’ll find ads for designers, perfumes, and cosmetics. Most people would agree that matching the message to the media and the reader is common practice and good advertising.

After all, what better place is there to sell golf clubs than in a media source that is read, watched or visited by people who play golf?

That is giving people what they expect. Dig deeper into the research of behavior and psychology, however, and you’ll start to uncover this fascinating truth. If you reach people who have an interest in what you’re selling, but do it in an environment where they don’t expect to see that kind of advertising message, you’ll grab their attention faster and your message will be more believable and memorable.

I learned this more than twenty-five years ago. In the early 1980s the publishing company I worked for acquired Fly Fisherman magazine from Ziff Davis. It was my job to do the marketing of the magazine to get more subscribers.

There were two obstacles when we bought the magazine. The first was that Fly Fisherman was the leading magazine about fly-fishing and therefore was already the single biggest source for reaching people with that interest. Typical circulation marketing efforts within the magazine, such as blow-in and bind-in cards, were already being done and had been done for years.

The second was that other sources, such as Orvis, that reached people interested in fly-fishing, also were already being used and had been used for years. So the obvious marketing paths were well trodden and worn. They still produced results, but at increasingly lower numbers.

Although my job was to get more subscribers, my challenge was to find new places to get them. It required thinking out of the box and doing the unexpected.

I started by looking at common patterns identified in readership studies with our subscriber base. One key pattern stood out. More than 90% of our subscribers were high earning white-collar executives. Armed with that knowledge, I then looked for the media source that reached the biggest number of high-earning white-collar executives in the highest concentration of their total numbers.

This led me to Boardroom Reports. And the rest, as they say, is history. My ads for Fly Fisherman magazine stood out in a media that had nothing to do with the sport, but everything to do with what interested their readers. And our number of subscribers increased.

Advertising a product in unrelated media is just one way doing the unexpected can boost your numbers. There are other ways to use the quirkiness of human behavior to your benefit. These include:

Understanding the “Real” Power of Free. Perhaps you have added a new product or service, expecting it to generate excitement and greatly stimulate your sales, only to find it sitting on the shelf with few takers.

If you want to boost sales of a new product, you could give it away with your best-selling product so that consumers would at least try it. However, if you do your giveaway in reverse it will work better.

Make your best-selling item the one you give away when the customer purchases the new product. The best-selling product is already something they value. So they’ll definitely use it. By paying for the new product they will be more likely to try it because they purchased it than if it was free. As a free item they wouldn’t associate a value with it and therefore wouldn’t feel bad about throwing it away or not trying it.

Studies show that if consumers desire the free item and place a high value on it in their minds, the value of the free item exceeds the cost they need to spend to get that item for free.

Narrow the Choice. Consumers are used to having more choices than they need for almost everything they buy. Studies show that all of these choices actually add stress to the shopping and purchasing experience. Retailers can capitalize on this in changing the way sales are conducted to drive shoppers into stores – brick and mortar or online.

Instead of a storewide sale or a sale for broad categories of merchandise, have a sale for only one specific category or niche. For example, if you sell clothing, put only black clothing on sale. This limits the purchase decision to “which black items does the customer want?” By limiting the choice to just black, it makes it easier for the customer to decide to buy.

Offer Random Rewards. If getting repeat traffic to your Web site is one of your priorities, get your Web visitors to keep coming back by delivering an unexpected reward on the site. Program a random reward for your site. For example, if you are a destination (entertainment venue, city or town, or tourism area), have a message randomly appear on the site making that visitor the winner of something such as a free meal at a restaurant in your destination.

You can program it so that only every 10th visitor (or whatever number you want) receives the offer. The Web visitor downloads a redeemable certificate for the free meal. This unexpected reward will get them to come to the destination more than if there was an incentive posted on the site for everyone.

This same approach can be used for all types of Web sites including B2B and professional services.

Create Unusual “Appreciation” Days. Customer appreciation days are not a new concept. However, try a new twist on this concept. This can work for all types of businesses and can be promoted in whatever media works best for you. Create very vertical niche groups of customers based on an unusual characteristic. For that group have a special one-day only appreciation offer. Do this on a regular basis, changing out the unique characteristics for a different niche each time.

Have fun with it. Make it quirky. For example, a restaurant could use an astrology theme so that anyone with a birthday in the Zodiac sign of Pisces gets a free glass of wine with the order of a fish entrée. Another time it can be anyone who is a Cancer gets a free appetizer when they order a crab entrée. Staying within a theme not only makes it fun, it gives people reasons to choose that restaurant over another when making the “where to eat” decision.

As you look for ways to stand out from the crowd in a very crowded marketplace, doing the unexpected gets your marketing noticed. It gets people talking about you and listening to you. It can make them visit your Web site more often, and motivate them to make that first purchase from you.

When consumers are no longer spending as usual, you can’t be advertising as usual and still expect to get results.

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